Even though many consider her to be the most important woman of the German new wave, at the same time disregarding its far more radical representatives such as Helma Sanders-Brahms, Margarethe Von Trotta is undoubtedly one of its key figures. Nevertheless, she was the first one to reject the “feminist” label because she did not want to remain “ghettoized”. Her entire early opus was a continuous interweaving of the personal and political. That strong “woman of steel” and a bold chronicler of the German “steel times”, began her career as an actress in films directed by Reiner Werner Fassbinder (The American Soldier) and Volker Schlöndorff (in his Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach she was the co-screenwriter and narrator. Her relationship with Schlöndorff, personal through marriage and professional continues with the Lost Honor of Katharina Blum that they directed together.

Von Trotta’s directing debut The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages) incorporates all the author’s obsessions and thematic preoccupations, reduced to the complexity of female relationships that often rest on violence. The film was inspired by a story about a kindergarten teacher from Munich who became a terrorist and a bank robber.  Unlike the dark Sanders-Brahms, Von Trotta’s fascination with women is bold and candid, while the manner in which she speaks about women is quite wondrous. She was and remains one of the few filmmakers who portrayed terrorism convincingly. Naturally, the enigma that extends throughout the film is utterly vital as well as irritatingly absurd, which was obviously the author’s goal. Her seminal piece of work Sisters or the Balance of Happiness is probably her most personal film, even though it is not that political as much as the next one Marianne & Juliane that was inspired by the case of Gudrun Enslin, in which the author once again questions the roots of (female) resistance and revolt, thus creating a disturbing mosaic of personal and political histories. As in her previous film Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, terrorism is a phenomenon that takes place outside of the film frame. It is pure probing of historical continuity in a culture that is trying to deny it. However, the ending is utterly individualized with Julianne who retires from her professional work as a journalist and continues to work privately, while explaining to her nephew the reasons that compelled his mother to action.
Therefore “sisters” and their emotional relationships continue to appear throughout Von Trotta’s opus, wherein seemingly “normal” and tough personalities always clash with the other dark, violent and transgressive half. Nevertheless the author’s most sophisticated film that continues to probe her favorite topics, remains Heller Wahn, torn between the Provance and Cairo starring the  unique Hana Schygulla as a literature professor who is trying to save a painter from the her cruel husband (supposedly the character of the husband is based on Shlöndorff).

While Werner Herzog is the only one of the German new wave directors who did not have to be ashamed of his later phase, primatrily thanks to his great documentaries Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss, Von Trotta experienced a similar downward spiral as Wenders in his later years. She mostly directed for television and they are miles apart from her “steel” films from the 1960’s and 1970’s. A similar thing occurred with her recent film Hanna Arendt that follows the author’s fascination with great women (Rosa Luxemburg). In this case she was focused on a specific period of the heroine’s life, was less interested in the mechanism of a conventional biopic and wanted to show how thought occurs. The intimate and public is again in the focus. Because the “exchange” of views between Hannah Arendt and Eichmann, during which the recording of the process that he is watching on TV take over the role of their intermediary, underlines the inability of the film to retain the complexity of the story.  

Nevertheless, Von Trotta does not give up. It is as if time and history are the only possible topics for her. In The Misplaced World (Die Abhandene Welt, 2015), that history is not as explicit as in Hannah Arendt, it is rather formed through photographs that “tell the entire life”, similar to some film by Leouche. However, there is a certain feeling of fatigue in the author’s storyline, underlined with the cold coloring of a melodrama, remaining an eternal prisoner of the story. What remains comes down to a feeling of nostalgia for an epoch and a film that has already become history. (Dragan Rubeša)